Even with the power of the AMD Athlon X2 and Intel Extreme Edition processors, we still find ourselves hitting a CPU limitation in a lot of our benchmarks. That is, the graphics cards have more performance to give but the processor is letting the team down.

By overclocking the processor we can see what kind of a performance increase we get. When something isn't CPU limited the performance increase isn't all that major but when we do have a CPU bottleneck, every MHz extra we can get can show us an excellent jump in performance.

The Athlon X2 3800+ was increased from 2GHz to 2.35GHz with a slight increase in the front side bus utilizing the stock X2 HSF.

At the lower resolution where the CPU is under more load we can see that the overclock gave us a nice little increase with the 1600 x 1200 result being quite minor.

3DMark05 yields excellent performance with the CPU overclock receiving a 1000 point increase at the lower resolutions and an 800 point increase at the higher resolution. With some more tweaking and time on your hands you should be breaking records in no time.

As we mentioned early Far Cry really felt the CPU limitation and with a slight increase in FSB we got another 6 FPS bringing us to over 90FPS. As you can see though, with the performance being so close at both resolutions when overclocked we are still CPU limited even with overclocking in play.

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